What makes "jazz" the revolutionary music of the 20th century, and will it be revolutionary for the 21st century?

African American Review, Summer, 1995 by Fred Wei-han Ho

"Jazz" is the music of the emerging African American proletariat or urban, industrial working class. Its predecessor, blues, was the music of post-Reconstruction. Just as old socioeconomic formations persist while new ones supplant them, so also do musical forms overlap. One exception is the persistence of pre-20th-century Western European "classical" music today - a result of the continual institutional/cultural expression of white settler-colonialism in North America.

"Jazz" emerged as formerly rural African American laborers traveled north to the urban industrial and commercial centers of Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia. A new music arose with a new class of urban workers grafting the rich and unique African American music of formerly enslaved plantation laborers, rural tenant farmers, and migratory workers onto a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, industrial, and multiethnic urban culture of growing capitalist America.

No longer Southern, blues, or field songs, the music draws on all these cultural precedents and transforms them. All of the characteristics of African American music that are distinctive and transformative of Western European concert music are retained but intensified: The Western European concert tradition of metronomic sense of time and general singularity of rhythm vis-a-vis the grafting of West African multiple and layered rhythms produces the polyrhythmicality of African American 20th-century music; the fixed pitch and fixed diatonic temperament of Western European concert music vis-a-vis West and Central African modalism and non-fixed pitch produce the blue notes of African American music; the primacy of written notation in Western European concert music vis-a-vis West and Central African oral tradition produces a revolutionary unity of composition and improvisation for 20th-century African American music; and the primacy of the conductor and composer for Western European concert music vis-a-vis call and response/soloist-leader and group leads to the player-as-leader-as-soloist-as-virtuoso improviser/performer/composer.

The music develops a high degree of sophistication and complexity, utilizing and combining features of both the compositional/notational and improvisational/oral traditions. Yet, due to national oppression, "jazz" was, ironically, spared the canonization and institutionalization that the concert music of Western Europe underwent as part of the establishment of white-supremacist settler-colonialism in U.S. society. Thus, the music became both a folk/popular music and an art/classical music that could be performed and enjoyed in not only the "lowest" of venues but also the "highest" concert halls. Until recently, the music, by virtue of its very position as the creative expression of an oppressed nationality excluded from most of American mainstream society (except when acceptably "covered" by white artists), resisted the calcification and ossification that "classical" music had undergone. For the most part, "jazz" has never looked back to the past as "classical" music has - fixated upon finer and finer degrees of perfection in the interpretation of past, "classic" treasures. Rather, "jazz" has been about the present ("Now Is the Time") and the future ("Space Is the Place").